Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #37, Summer 1993
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The Revolution of Everyday Life
by Raoul Vaneigem
Chapter 16
The Fascination of
Time
The impossibility of realization:
Power as sum of seductions
Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes fools of them,
the seduction of power is what makes them love their oppression.
Because of it people give up their real riches: (a) for a cause
that mutilates them [chapter twelve], (b) for an imaginary unity
that fragments them [chapter thirteen], (c) for an appearance that
reifies them [chapter fourteen], (d) for roles that wrest them from
authentic life [chapter fifteen], (e) for a time whose passage
defines and confines them [chapter sixteen].
People are bewitched into believing that time slips away, and this
belief is the basis of time actually slipping away. Time is the
work of attrition of that adaptation to which people must resign
themselves so long as they fail to change the world. Age is a role,
an acceleration of `lived' time on the plane of appearances, an
attachment to things.
The growth of civilization's discontents is now forcing every
branch of therapeutics towards a new demonology. Just as, formerly,
invocation, sorcery, possession, exorcism, black sabbaths,
metamorphoses, talismans and all the rest were bound up with the
suspect capacity for healing and hurting, so today (and more
effectively) the apparatus for offering consolation to the
oppressed - medicine, ideology, compensatory roles, consumer
gadgetry, movements for social change - serves the oppressor and
the oppressor alone. The order of things is sick: this is what our
leaders would conceal at all costs. In a fine passage of The
Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich relates how after long months
of psychoanalytic treatment he managed to cure a young Viennese
working woman. She was suffering from depression brought on by the
conditions of her life and work. When she was recovered Reich sent
her back home. A fortnight later she killed herself. Reich's
intransigent honesty condemned him, as everyone knows, to exclusion
from the psychoanalytic establishment, to isolation, delusion and
death in prison: the duplicity of our neodemonologists cannot be
exposed with impunity.
Those who organize the world organize both suffering and the
anaesthetics for dealing with it; this much is common knowledge.
Most people live like sleepwalkers, torn between the gratification
of neurosis and the traumatic prospect of a return to real life.
Things are now reaching the point, however, where the maintenance
of survival calls for so many analgesics that the organism ap-
proaches saturation point. But the magical analogy is more apt here
than the medical: practitioners of magic fully expect a backlash
effect in such circumstances, and we should expect the same. It is
because of the imminence of this upheaval that I compare the
present conditioning of human beings to a massive bewitchment.
Bewitching of this kind presupposes a spatial network which links
up the most distant objects sympathetically, according to specific
laws: formal analogy, organic coexistence, functional symmetry,
symbolic affiliation, etc. Such correspondences are established
through the infinitely frequent association of given forms of
behaviour with appropriate signals. In other words, through a
generalized system of conditioning. The present vogue for loudly
condemning the role of conditioning, propaganda, advertising and
the mass media in modern society may be assumed to be a form of
partial exorcism designed to reinforce a vaster and more essential
mystification by distracting attention from it. Outrage at the
gutter press goes hand in hand with subservience to the more
elegant lies of posh journalism. Media, language, time - these are
the giant claws with which Power manipulates humanity and moulds it
brutally to its own perspective. These claws are not very adept,
admittedly, but their effectiveness is enormously increased by the
fact that people are not aware that they can resist them, and often
do not even know the extent to which they are already spontaneously
doing so.
Stalin's show trials proved that it only takes a little patience
and perseverance to get a man to accuse himself of every imaginable
crime and appear in public begging to be executed. Now that we are
aware of such techniques, and on our guard against them, how can we
fail to see that the set of mechanisms controlling us uses the very
same insidious persuasiveness - though with more powerful means at
its disposal, and with greater persistence - when it lays down the
law: ``You are weak, you must grow old, you must die.''
Consciousness acquiesces, and the body follows suit. I am fond of
a remark of Artaud's, though it must be set in a materialist light:
``We do not die because we have to die: we die because one day, and
not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it neces-
sary.''
Plants transplanted to an unfavourable soil die. Animals adapt to
their environment. Human beings transform theirs. Thus death is not
the same thing for plants, animals and humans. In favourable soil,
the plant lives like an animal: it can adapt. Where man fails to
change his surroundings, he too is in the situation of an animal.
Adaptation is the law of the animal world.
According to Hans Selye, the theoretician of `stress', the general
syndrome of adaptation has three phases: the alarm reaction, the
phase of resistance and the phase of exhaustion. In terms of real
life he is still at the level of animal adaptation: spontaneous
reactions in childhood, consolidation in maturity, exhaustion in
old age. And today, the harder people try to find salvation in
appearances, the more vigorously is it borne in upon them by the
ephemeral and inconsistent nature of the spectacle that they live
like dogs and die like bundles of hay. The day cannot be far off
when men will have to face the fact that the social organization
they have constructed to change the world according to their wishes
no longer serves this purpose. For all this organization amounts to
is a system of prohibitions preventing the creation of a higher
form of organization and the use therein of the techniques of
liberation and individual self-realization which have evolved
throughout the history of privative appropriation, of exploitation
of man by man, of hierarchical authority.
We live in a closed, suffocating system. Whatever we gain in one
sphere we lose in another. Death, for instance, though
quantitatively defeated by modern medicine, has re-emerged qualita-
tively on the plane of survival. Adaptation has been democratized,
made easier for everyone, at the price of abandoning the essential
project, which is the adaptation of the world to human needs.
A struggle against death exists, of course, but it takes place
within the limits set by the adaptation syndrome: death is part of
the cure for death. Significantly, therapeutic efforts concentrate
mainly on the exhaustion phase, as though the main aim were to
extend the stage of resistance as far as possible into old age.
Thus the big guns are brought out only once the body is old and
weak, because, as Reich understood well, any all-out attack on the
attrition wreaked by the demands of adaptation would inevitably
mean a direct onslaught on social organization - i.e., on that
which stands opposed to any transcendence of the principle of
adaptation. Partial cures are preferred because they leave the
overall social pathology untouched. But what will happen when the
proliferation of such partial cures ends up spreading the malaise
of inauthenticity to every corner of daily life? And when the es-
sential role of exorcism and bewitchment in the maintenance of a
sick society becomes plain for all to see?
* * *
The question ``How old are you?'' inevitably contains a reference
to power. Dates themselves serve to pigeonhole and circumscribe us.
Is not the passage of time always measured by reference to the
establishment of some authority or other - in terms of the years
accumulated since the installation of a god, messiah, leader or
conquering city? To the aristocratic mind, moreover, such
accumulated time was a measure of authority: the prepotency of the
lord was increased both by his own age and by the antiquity of his
lineage. At his death the noble bequeathed a vitality to his heirs
which drew vigour from the past. By contrast, the bourgeoisie has
no past; or at any rate it recognizes none inasmuch as its
fragmented power no longer depends on any hereditary principle. The
bourgeoisie is thus reduced to aping the nobility: identification
with forebears is sought in nostalgic fashion via the photos in the
family album; identification with cyclical time, with the time of
the eternal return, is feebly emulated by blind identification with
a staccato succession of short spans of linear time.
This link between age and the starting-post of measurable time is
not the only thing which betrays age's kinship with power. I am
convinced that people's measured age is nothing but a role. It
involves a speeding up of lived time in the mode of non-life - on
the plane, therefore, of appearances, and in accordance with the
dictates of adaptation. To acquire power is to acquire `age'. In
earlier times only the `aged' or `elders', those old either in
nobility or in experience, exercised power. Today even the young
enjoy the dubious privilege of age. In fact consumer society, which
invented the teenager as a new class of consumer, fosters premature
senility: to consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity, nurturing
appearance to the advantage of the spectacle and to the detriment
of real life. The consumer is killed by the things he becomes at-
tached to, because these things (commodities, roles) are dead.
Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that
makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things - makes
you old. Time-which-slips-away is what fills the void created by
the absence of the self. The harder you run after time, the faster
time goes: this is the law of consumption. Try to stop it, and it
will wear you out and age you all the more easily. Time has to be
caught on the wing, in the present - but the present has yet to be
constructed.
We were born never to grow old, never to die. All we can hope for,
however, is an awareness of having come too soon. And a healthy
contempt for the future can at least ensure us a rich portion of
life.
The complete text of the Left Bank/Rebel Press edition of Raoul
Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life is available from C.A.L.
(POB 1446, Columbia, MO. 65205-1446) for $12.00 postpaid.